4 ms·
It took almost 5 years for our organization to move off Lotus Notes and that was a concerted effort with a considerably smaller foot print. We had a handful of
by cptskippy 8y ago
It took almost 5 years for our organization to move off Lotus Notes and that was a concerted effort with a considerably smaller foot print. We had a handful of full-time Notes developers and administrators on staff and were still paying quite a bit in support from IBM annually.
This is a bargain by comparison.
Lotus Notes is incredibly reliable so if the department is just maintaining the system as is, without upgrades or changes, while developing a new replacement solution then a single administrator is probably more than what's needed.
- greedo 8y agoOur company uses LN. We've been on a five year plan to migrate to Exchange for the last decade.
- cptskippy 8y agoExchange can be just the tip of the iceberg. Our organization had a hundred or so custom applications and databases in Notes. That being said, Exchange migration can be really tricky too depending on your retention policies, legal obligations around data preservation, and other factors. If you're doing onprem installs of Exchange rather than hosted solutions, you also have to worry about disaster recovery. Say what you want about LN but it's built-in backup, retention, and recovery mechanisms put Exchange and even most Databases to shame. I wasn't directly involved in our org's migration but from what I understand, the org waited until it had settled most or all outstanding litigation before attempting to migration. When they did, we changed our data retention policy for email from forever to 6 months before starting. This significantly reduced the volume and scope of work. And I think we kept the 6 month policy after migration because it's legally advantageous.
- greedo 8y agoWe have our long term retention (SEC compliance) with Smarsh, but everything else is 3 months or less. And even after implementing Exchange, we still have a lot of applications in LN that will be retained until someone decides the cost to re-write them is cheaper than licensing and support for LN.
- scarface74 8y agoAmazon has been trying to move off Oracle for 5 years and it’s still expected to take two more. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/amazon-plans-to-move-off-oracle-software-by-early-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/amazon-plans-to-move-off-ora... Moving off of an infrastructure is hard.....
- cptskippy 8y agoIt is and vendors certainly don't make it easy to do. Most migration tools are written by the competition and are usually lackluster at best.
- scarface74 8y agoAs I mentioned, the App Store and the iTunes Store are still on WebObjects. It’s not because of vendor lock in, its always hard to change infrastructure. If ain’t broke, don’t fix it. No company is going to change from AWS to Azure to temporarily save a little money and very few statistically are going to take thier infrastructure in house that were in AWS and buy a lot of colo equipment in multiple data centers and hire a bunch of people to maintain it if it’s not their core business. Netflix is famous for transitioning from thier own infrastructure to AWS. If you look at thier open source tooling, there are a lot of AWS specific pieces.